The faucets were still flowing Monday following the latest surge in the ongoing legal battle for control of the county’s water system late last week.

That conflict, which has pitted the newly-comprised county commission lineup against the board of the South Cumberland cooperative District (SCCD) and its oversight body, the Governmental Utility Services Corporation of Cullman County (GUSC), escalated again last Thursday after the commission elected to suspend longtime water department manager David Bussman.

The move to suspend Bussman without pay until an investigation into the department’s recent administrative practices has concluded launched a series of cat-and-mouse moves on both sides that continued through Monday afternoon, with the county receiving a reaffirmation of a circuit judge’s order that puts the title to the water department’s assets back in county hands — at least for now.

At immediate issue is a difference in interpretation over how each side may proceed, as the SCCD waits to learn whether a $500,000 defendants’ surety bond it submitted to the circuit clerk’s office last week will be approved. That matters because the bond — which the Supreme Court of Alabama required of the SCCD in order for it to continue the appeals process over a May circuit court injunction against it — is pivotal in determining whether the SCCD or the county, for the time being, has legal custody to the water system, its employees and its assets.

If the bond is accepted by Circuit Clerk Robert Bates, the SCCD will control the water department until all pending litigation challenging its right to exist is resolved. If the clerk’s office rejects the bond, the county will maintain control of the system.

 The interpretive differences between the two sides was resolved Monday, however, when Circuit Judge Don Hardeman issued an order charging the clerk’s office with re-deeding all the water system’s real and personal assets — everything from the department headquarters to pipes in the ground to work trucks to employee computers — back to Cullman County.

The grounds for Hardeman’s new order stem from the expiration of a series of Supreme Court-ordered stays of Hardeman’s May injunction. The latest of those, issued on Sept. 29, passed without the SCCD having posted the bond — called a supersedeas bond — by the deadlines indicated by the court.

In order to clarify the county’s interim assertion of its right to the water system, attorneys requested Friday that Hardeman order a re-deeding of the department’s four-county network of assets back to the county, along with a circuit clerk’s bill of sale.

 Hardeman responded the same day with an order granting that request.

In the order, Hardeman wrote, “...the parties’ competing claims to the assets of the Cullman County Water Department have reached a heightened level of tension this week, with threats of arrest...the Plaintiffs’ motion for Issuance of a Clerk’s Deed and Bill of Sale is hereby granted...The Court intends by this order to reiterate that all of the real and personal assets purportedly transferred by or on behalf of Cullman County to the South Cumberland Cooperative District on April 27, 2010, be returned and restored to Cullman County in the same manner and form as they were held prior to the Cullman County Commission’s meeting of April 27, 2010.”

 The April meeting started the entire water controversy, so far as the courts are concerned. That meeting saw two of the three county commissioners approve applications from county residents — all of whom would, in the same day, become board members for the SCCD — for incorporation of a water utility and an intermediary oversight board which would take ownership of the department, as well as an employment agreement entrusting to SCCD the services of the department’s 30 staff members.

Commission chairman James Graves and five county residents quickly responded with a lawsuit against the associate commissioners who made that decision, as well as the SCCD and the GUSC boards.

Monday’s legal filings came after the SCCD ordered an Information Technology (IT) contractor last Thursday to deny anyone acting under instruction of the county commission access to the water department’s computer server system. That move — which could have shut down all departmental activities related to computer use and data storage — was countered by county IT workers, who were able to reconfigure the department’s passcode-protected computers and allow employees access to billing information and other necessary day-to-day computer-based operations.

The SCCD responded to that bypass, as well as Judge Hardeman’s Monday order, by having an attorney file a motion before the Supreme Court requesting that the county be held in contempt for asserting its rights to the department’s deeds and bill of sale after the SCCD had — its attorneys argue — lived up to its court-mandated obligation to retain control of the department by submitting the supersedeas bond. The county has until Friday to deliver a response to that request before the high court.



* Benjamin Bullard can be reached by e-mail at bbullard@cullmantimes.com or by telephone at 734-2131 ext. 270.